Superman's Crash Landing

[dmat]

I've been wondering about this for a while and wonder if someone could help me out.

Everyone knows Superman's origin, how a rocketship/spaceship crashlands on Earth and how he's raised by a kind farm couple.  The question is, what prevented the military from tracking the ship as it crashlanded and confiscating the baby inside?  It's an interesting idea, and followed with gusto in Marvel's Supreme Power.  I was just wondering if DC has an official/canon explanation for why this never happened.

I could see it in the 1930s and earlier, as there was no sophisticated radar net or tracking satellites, but for our modern era Superman, there should be a consistant explanation, I just can't seem to find the official one.  A couple of books I've read (Superman: The Never Ending Battle by Stern and Last Sons by Al Grant) provide a brief explanation (a blizzard and meteor shower respectively), but I don't think they're canon.

[jamespup]

My guess would be some Kryptonian stealth technology, or that aspect was just inherent in the composition of the pod

[Aldous]

It's a good question.

I'm assuming you have read the excellent story "Superman 2001" (1976) by Elliot, Cary, Curt, and Bob. They explore just such a scenario.

But that's an Imaginary story.

As to what really happened, maybe the Kryptonian rocket just came in SO  D A M N E D  FAST that no one could draw a bead on it. It couldn't burn up and the baby couldn't be hurt, so..... And Jor-El's technology may have allowed it to slow down extremely quickly (once at the surface of a planet) so that it didn't wipe out half the countryside with a giant crater.

[dmat]

I've read it now, thanks!  It's a cool story.  It's a good thing that Superbaby is invulnerable, otherwise he would have had a very short career.

All hail president Wiener!

[Johnny Nevada]

Guessing since there was no space program until the late 1950's, it never really came up during the Golden or Silver Age comics (since Kal-El was depicted landing on Earth before the launch of Sputnik during these eras).

Byrne's Man of Steel revamp was apparently the first depiction to take place during/just after Sputnik's launch (Pa Kent refers to Kal-El as a "Sputnik baby"), given enough time had passed so that Superman would've landed on Earth in the late 1950's by that point. (Yeah, yeah, I know... just throwing this out for some example to draw from :-p ).  The early 2000s had some story where some staff member of Lex Luthor presents evidence of satellites in orbit 30 years ago picking up a sign of Kal-El's spaceship.

Cloaking technology might work (if Jor-El didn't want the military/some such less-than-parental figures picking up Kal-El for adoption)... or just the "no explanation" bit...

[JulianPerez]

For the most part, an explanation was never really necessary, because as Superman is assumed to have arrived on earth "thirty years before" whatever year it currently is, the year of Superman's arrival would have to have been anywhere from the 1930s to the late 1940s and early 1950s, and satellites and other such pieces of radar detection were not as exact as they are today.

All my knowledge of 1950s military radar technology comes from Japanese monster movies and fruity, moralizing B-pictures, but world-wide monitoring seems like an innovation in the later part of the decade of the 1950s. That is to say, the UFOs could come and go with impunity in EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS in 1951, but there was no way Rodan could, even at supersonic speed, avoid radar detection when it was time to make his flick in the middle sixties.

As for the theory that Superman came in too fast he avoided radar detection...the rocket and the baby would survive, but it's unlikely Kansas would. If he did come in too fast to avoid radar detection, there would have had to have been a superscience way to decelerate.

A more likely explanation is that Kryptonian metals are radar-reflective, not because of anything special Jor-El did, but because that's an inherent property. In "The Outlaw Legionnaires," it's learned that Superman and Supergirl's bodies cannot be seen with X-Rays (which was why to perform surgery they needed Ultra Boy's Penetra-Vision) which implies that Kryptonian matter can reflect some kinds of electromagnetism.

[nightwing]

Why would the military assume it's a spacecraft of any kind?  Things fall to Earth all the time, after all.

If the ship approached the Earth "looking" like a meteorite, it's doubtful the military would give it a second look.  Only detectable course corrections, a strange slowdown or speed up, a careful insertion into orbit before planetfall, etc would it give it away as a space ship.  It it drops straight in, it's just another piece of space debris, right?  Certainly it wasn't big enough to raise any alarms...it's not like it was big enough to wipe out a town on impact or anything.

I think once a spacecraft gets to the outer atmosphere, there's a period where it can't be tracked at all.  NASA keeps tabs on its shuttles throughout a mission but has a few minutes there on re-entry where it has no idea what's going on (Hence the surprise when Columbia rained down in pieces over the Southeast).  So if we lose track of our own stuff, how can we follow anything else?

Personally I think this a non-issue.  Also, I'm not a watcher of "Smallville," but I gather on that show the ship came to Earth amidst a meteor shower (of kryptonite).  It'd certainly aid a "stealth" entry if the ship was just one of many seemingly natural objects making entry.

[dmat]

That's a good point Nightwing. A lot of space junk comes crashing down every year, as well as meteors etc. If the government could detect everything that enters Earth's atmosphere, it certainly would be a duller world as we'd lose out on all those great UFO sightings 

I guess the reason this came to mind is that traditionally the Kryptonian spacecraft looks like a rocket ship, and I thought a fast, missile shaped object coming in for a landing during the height of the Cold War would be something the government would keep an eye out for.

It seems everyone agrees on some sort of stealth technology being key.